Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Caesar And Christ
July 11, 2004
From today’s Sunday Telegraph: Don’t allow Kerry to take Communion, Vatican chief tells US Catholic bishops
The advice is contained in an explosive memo - clearly directed at Sen. Kerry - by Cardinal [Joseph] Ratzinger, the Pope’s doctrinal advisor, who is head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the institutional heir to the Inquisition.
The memo was sent to the US Catholic Bishops’ conference last month. With formidable clarity and force, it states that pro-abortion Catholic politicians should be warned by priests that they are not eligible for Communion. If the politician then “shows an obstinate persistence in grave sin”, writes Cardinal Ratzinger, he or she should be turned away at the altar rail. Mr. Kerry has consistently voted in favour of maintaining abortion rights during his 30-year senatorial career.
The tone and content of Cardinal Ratzinger’s memo, which was leaked to an Italian magazine last week, leave little room for misunderstanding. Some passages appear to have been drafted specifically with Sen. Kerry in mind.
“Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia,” writes the Cardinal, “when a person’s formal co-operation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his pastor should meet with him, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist."…
Last month the Pope delighted White House election strategists by agreeing to meet President Bush in Rome after repeated overtures from Washington. A senior religious advisor to the White House told The Telegraph that there was “no doubt” that the Pope preferred President Bush to Sen. Kerry, even though the Vatican was strongly against the war in Iraq and the senator is a practising Catholic.
“I have been in Rome with the Pope and the president,” said Deal Hudson, one of the most prominent Catholic laymen in the US and the editor of the religious Crisis magazine. “I also represented the president in the 25th anniversary celebrations of John-Paul’s papacy. The Pope and his inner circle prefer pro-life Bush to pro-choice Kerry.”
As an institution, the Roman Catholic Church has the perfect right to decide many things for itself, through whatever procedures it prefers. Religious doctrines, rituals, personnel policies, and many other subjects are entirely within its purview. But as the professed conservators of the teachings of Christ, whose lineage of His Vicars reaches all the way back to Christ Himself, one thing the Church does not have the authority to do is to discard, deny, or contradict His explicit teachings.
These are the teachings I have in mind:
And they sent unto Him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, that they might catch Him in talk. And when they were come, they said unto Him, Master, we know that Thou art true, and carest not for any one: for Thou regardest not the person of men, but of a truth teachest the way of God: Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give? But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye Me? Bring Me a denarius, that I may see it. And they brought it. And He said unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto Him, Caesar’s. And Jesus said unto them, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. And they marveled greatly at Him.” [The Gospel According To Mark, 12:13-17]
And this one:
And everyone went to his own house. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down, and taught them. Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they say unto Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. “Now Moses, in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down, and wrote on the ground with His finger , as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the oldest, even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised himself up, and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” [The Gospel According To John, 7:53 - 8:11]
In the first passage cited above, Christ explicitly separated the spiritual authority from the temporal. The two realms of Divine and temporal justice are divided from one another, with the safeguarding of society charged to the temporal realm, while the guidance of the individual conscience and the judgment of the soul are reserved to God. In the second passage, after the Crucifixion and Resurrection perhaps the best known of all the events in the life of Christ, He decrees that there are sins which ought not to be crimes; that is, they ought not to be punishable by other men, whether as individuals or as agents of the State. In both matters, Christ’s New Covenant departs from the Mosaic Law set down in the Book of Leviticus, which makes no distinction between temporal and spiritual law or the proper authorities over them.
Intelligent persons, whatever their political bent, are aware that there are vices which, however terrible, must not be addressed with law, lest the situation grow still worse. Opinion is often divided on such matters. Some of the liveliest controversies in political discourse center on whether vices such as drug abuse, prostitution, gambling, drunkenness, smoking, obesity, adultery, and Michael Moore’s movies can be legislated against constructively. But there is virtually no disagreement on the principle that, in some cases, using the force of law will not mend but further rip the fabric of our society.
In a republic such as ours, where elected representatives decide such things for the whole country, it is their exact and only function to determine, according to their best judgment, where the force of law should and should not be applied. They are charged to do this for the greater general good, not for the salving of their own consciences.
Apparently Cardinal Ratzinger would have it another way. By Ratzinger’s dictum, a Catholic raised to public office must not only toe the doctrinal line as an individual, he must also strain to have sin, as defined by the Roman Catholic Church, made legally punishable, on pain of being severed from the Eucharist and the Mystical Body of Christ.
Let’s leave aside the departure from Christ’s own teaching for just a moment. Were this to become general knowledge, as it ought to be for the sake of persons of all faiths and none, how many American Catholics would be elected to legislative positions?
Is that the outcome Cardinal Ratzinger desires?
For lay Catholics, the crux of the matter must be the willingness of one of the Church’s highest prelates to set aside the clear doctrines of its Founder in favor of an undisguised attempt to wield influence over the decisions of legislators and voters. This is something worse than apostasy. It approaches clerical treason.
It is a supreme and terrible irony that the issue Cardinal Ratzinger is using for his power play is abortion, the issue on which Catholics worldwide are most nearly united. Abortion is a uniquely horrible thing. There is no imaginable rationale for it, except the highly theoretical one that in some cases the baby must die so that the mother might live. This is the Church’s position, elucidated in several encyclicals and over decades of teaching. It’s my position, and that of the overwhelming majority of Catholics as well. We would eagerly agree to have abortion re-criminalized...if we could be sure that doing so would not make matters worse.
But some of us are persuaded that a complete legal ban against abortion at any stage of gestation would make matters worse. We might be wrong, but we are nonetheless sincere. And we maintain that our spiritual standing is not compromised by our conviction that the use of State force against this sin would be destructive.
For Cardinal Ratzinger to use the spiritual authority of the Church in the temporal domain as he has—dictatorially yet secretively, and in contradiction to the teachings of Christ as they’ve been understood for two millennia—demonstrates that he is not worthy of his clerical stature. This is not unprecedented; there have been many cardinals and a few Pontiffs who’ve disgraced their offices. It’s unclear whether the ailing Pope John Paul II will act to quell this act of clerical malfeasance, or whether the mess will be left to his successors. But it’s quite clear that, with such a man promulgating Church doctrine without oversight, it will become ever more difficult for sober, responsible Christians to remain with the Roman Catholic Church.
Will Christ forgive one of His ordained ministers for such a betrayal?
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